French Recipes

Mashed potatoes are my guilty pleasure. For this version, green peas complement the flavor of this version and gives a beautiful color and wonderful texture to the purée.

My baby girl is already over 5 months old and I've started introducing solid food to her in the past 2 weeks. I've given her a diversity of vegetables already. Today, I tried feeding her legumes and made some baby food for her using peas. They're perfect because they're starchy and have a wonderful texture. I passed them through a large mesh sieve to remove the "skin" from the peas, which gave me the idea of making something similar for the family.

Here's a quick, simple and easy recipe for vegetarian lasagna. I substituted lavash pizza bread for the regular lasagna pasta sheets. Lavash bread can be easily cut, so it's fun to make different shaped lasagna, but perhaps most important, it doesn't need to be precooked! The texture is slightly more firm on the top layer, but as ooey-gooey as one would expect on the inside. It's familiar but at the same time refreshing and new.

I made this dish with my friends from California Lavash. They came to my houseand we cooked up a storm, took pictures, and generally had a blast. Love the product, ladies!

In this dish, I paired shallow pan-fried mackerel steaks with a fresh vegetable relish. The relish is made of baby cucumber, lemon, daikon radish, dill and wasabi-infused oil. The sweet and spicy notes give the dish the ideal balance of flavor as the acidic taste cuts through the richness of the fried fish. I served the pan-fried fish on a bed of lavash bread so it could soak up the delicious goodness from the relish.

The dish takes no time to cook and the relish can be prepared in advance.

On any given night, there are dishes from two or more cultures on our dining table. And I often combine the leftovers to make something new the following day. As an example, we recently had some extra dopiaza(onion duo curry), which I used to flavor risotto. The onion gravy melded with the creamy Arborio rice and came out beautifully.

I've come up with several recipes using this flavorful curry, such as onion tatin tart, onion-filled manicotti and gratin casserole dishes. If you browse through the site, you'll find other recipes to help you waste less food and save money at the same time. It works for my family, so it should work for yours as well.

It's Persian New Year! I was at my local Persian grocery store today and I noticed an abundance of whole hazelnuts being sold. They looked beautiful, so I bought a large bag of nuts, which were eaten fairly quickly by all the family. I turned the remaining nuts into a fine mill and made frangipane tarts in the evening.

To make the dessert look ultra fancy without being too complicated, I topped the hazelnut cream with bruléedbananas. Caramelizing the bananas brought out additional flavors that really complemented the hazelnut cream and the flaky puff pastry.

My cousin's husband Hoss from Ohio is Persian, so we called him to send him our best wishes. But unfortunately, he changed his number and didn't tell us. The person who picked up was utterly confused. So Hoss, if you're reading this, "Happy Nowruz"!